Advice from Veteran Voices of Protest to Young Climate Activists

Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD

Progressive Radio Network, October 8, 2019

Finally there are noticeable stirrings of a world awakening to the plight of civilization and a livable planet. After fifty years of false starts, a diverse community of independent voices are finally being heard en masse, such as Chris Hedges. Jane Goodall, Bill McKibben, Guy McPherson, Vandana Shiva, and more recently Greta Thunberg, Jamie Mangolin and other environmental youth leaders. We are being warned that our Western lifestyle as individual consumers, trapped in the fangs of neoliberal capitalist mythologies of infinite progress and development, are having an astronomically detrimental impact upon our earth’s finite resources and ecological diversity.  Ultimately, as the MIT’s Limits of Growth report warned 47 years ago, continuing business-as-usual will have dire consequences. Unfortunately there is no concerted collective international effort to deal with humanity’s rate of consumption and addiction to economic growth

During the past year, the climate and environmental news has been consistently reporting record heat waves and the hottest months on record since temperature measurements started. Reactionary governments in the US, Brazil, India and Indonesia are further destroying the last protected reserves of our natural ecologies. Over populated cities are being threatened by water shortages and rising sea levels.  And climate scientists repeatedly warn that tipping points are nearer than previously calculated.

What has fundamentally shifted is that it is no longer a fringe group of climatologists and boisterous environmental activists who comprehend the atmospheric science’s extreme predictions. For too long these have been the lone voices sounding the alarm for immediate global action by governments and private industry before it is too late.  Instead it was left to 16-year old girl Greta Thunberg to force the international politick to begin paying attention.  Regardless of what others might think of Thunberg, she remains the strongest and most significant voice at this moment for demanding that it is time to put aside our human hubris, political differences and take responsibility for what we should have done decades ago. Time will tell if she will be successful.

Despite Greta’s likely handlers in the corporate-friendly Green charade, her message remains strident, focused and unblinking. There is nothing muted, censored or sugar-coated in her outrage. For the younger generations, the Boomers’ enslavement  to unfettered capitalism and the Washington Consensus’s globalized hegemony has despoiled their world and they want us to wake up to that fact. On the other hand, perhaps too much attention is being place upon Greta while ignoring other young environmental activists who have been in the trenches for a much longer period of time.

But this potential revolution in our midst is still in its infancy. The majority of Millennials and post-Millennials or iGen linger in a virtual comfort zone and more awakening to climate change’s imminent threats is much needed.  Even with Greta’s message and a renewed popular directive for urgency, we believe that very little will likely change in the US, China, India and many other developed countries that are most responsible for global warming. Corporate executives and politicians care little about school-striking teenagers on the march.  They are not stockholders nor voters.

In the US, the roughly 16 million Americans representing the highly educated and professional class and the elite one percent, and their families, are motivated solely by the drive to increase their standard of living and socio-economical influence. They dictate the public discourse in the mainstream media and are fully aware of the problems humanity faces. By intention, they also choose to retreat from the solutions. Democrats, Libertarians and Republicans alike are neoliberal ideologues. The Green New Deal will likely be ruled unattainable. Much of its agenda is embarrassingly immature  because it throws its weight behind a perverse green neoliberal economy in order  to generate a green market to keep the wealthy flush in paper green.  Yet it is the same leaders of industry and their political enablers who need to come of up with the radical solutions, and they will certainly fail to do so.

Therefore we are suggesting that Greta and other activists aligned with her message to be very pragmatic. When she spoke before an assembly of the global creme de la creme at Davos, these were the same people who flew into Switzerland on private jets and dined on Kobi steaks. This corporate elite are the greatest contributors and supporters of global warming and environmental degradation. Al Gore and his ilk of hedge funders, the large environmental organizations — such as the World Wildlife Fund,  the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development — are already eager to take advantage of Greta’s international attention and naiveté. Perhaps she is fully aware of this.

We continue to support, as should all adults, the teenage Friday school strikes and protests; but there is much that students can do on the campuses of their high schools and colleges to further coordinate events and utilize resources to better educate themselves about the future they will be forced to navigate. There are also many veteran activists among Boomers who have deep experience in strategic protest during the Vietnam War and early civil rights era. Seeking guidance and advice from seasoned dissidents can only benefit the climate youth movement despite its understandable and valid reluctance. There is much to be gained by creating campus teach-ins focused upon:

• The ecological and health benefits of adopting a plant-based diet and going vegetarian/vegan
• Learning from community organizers about the social assets from buying local, creating urban and community farms, conscious recycling, etc.
• The need for a new Slow Movement or “minimalist” lifestyle to counter the destructive habits of our run-away consumer culture.
• Workshops in the many individual ways each of us can reduce our energy consumption and pressure schools to do the same.
• Listening to the wisdom of Native American and other indigenous voices about humanity’s connection with nature and our responsibility to protect it.
• Educating themselves about the enormous health and environmental risks from the new 5G technology or the “internet of everything” that is being falsely advertized as a green solution to reduce energy consumption. This too the youth of the world must start to protest against.
• Organizing collective efforts to protect local ecologies and plant trees.

But, all the responsibility should not rest upon our youth to mobilize our nations. A growing compassion is critical and urgent among adults and taking ownership for the many ways they have contributed to the wretched future their children will face. Climate change doesn’t pick winners and losers. Nor does the earth care whether or not humans breed on her skin like parasites. Faced with the earth’s apathy, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words become all too poignant, “The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”